Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Ah! The stress-lowering benefits of blogging!

It's been about a year and a half since the last time I was annoyed enough about a bumper sticker to blog about one!

And this time, it's not so much annoyance as incredulity. As is so often the case when a car owner's ability to inflict his opinions on others is a substitute for an actual sense of self-worth, the below bumper sticker appeared with about six others on the back of a jalopy.

Cumulatively, the half-dozen or so stickers screamed of preening moral relativism and bigoted pseudotolerance, and rendered their companion, the Pacifica radio station sticker, doubly redundant. (After all, if one is so benighted as to not have already tuned to it, let alone to have to ask which station it is, he will need more than being told! Such stickers are shibboleths only.)

But I digress. The other stickers, suffice it to say, clearly indicated that even though one may be capable of arranging words in such a way as to express a profound truth as they are arranged below, one may well, like a parrot, not have a grasp, however slippery, upon that truth.

Quite true. Terrorism is a symptom. But of what disease? I am sure that the person who was driving in front of me would say something like "poverty", or "oppression by the racist West", or anything besides the disease the terrorists themselves have forthrightly admitted suffering for decades: The motivation to govern in accordance with the alleged orders of their imaginary friend.

Whether or not our anti-war activist honestly believes that the secular West is ultimately at fault for the atrocities so many religious people feel so pious about committing is unimportant. What is important is that he chides us for wanting to fight back, taking advantage of our President's failure to name our adversary in the process, and presumably counting on multiculturalism to make us too afraid of being thought of as bigoted to name the actual disease. His animus against the West is such that his enemy's enemy is his friend, so he is happy to help the West's enemy in any way he can.

Of course, many leftists, needing more guidance than blind nihilism can provide, eventually do seek it in the form of that most anti-Western faith, Islam, making it all but certain that one day, we shall see, side by side on the back of someone's car, the riddle presented by the first bumper sticker and its ... solution ... by the one at the right, with all the irony lost on its unkempt owner!

The final irony is, of course, that so many terrorists believe -- despite the long history of sectarian violence that is the history of Islam -- that if we were all Moslem, peace would reign. This is patently absurd. Faith kills -- first because it causes men to reject crucial evidence about all manner of important things and second, because it preempts rational persuasion, resulting in men dealing with each other like brutes.